Here’s to TV, etc.

TV Toaster is a blog dedicated to reviews of movies (some new), TV shows (mostly old), and music (we prefer the classics). We also feature quotes, favorite scenes, and other goodies that catch my eye and keep me amused.

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Archive for September, 2013

Pros/Things I like
-The service is free.
-It’s been around for years, and (from what I can tell) has been fairly reliable.
-They record various data about your site’s visitors, including what browser they use, screen resolution, etc.
-My favorite feature is the “last 100 referrers” to my websites. To me, where my visitors are coming from is at least as important as how many total visitors I receive. None of the other counters that I’ve tried offered this. (Although, to be honest, it’s been years since I added a counter, or tried any new counter service. The current offerings may vary.)

Cons/Limitations/Things I don’t like
-I think it does require registration.
-If your page receives only few visitors over a long period of time, they will cancel your counter for inactivity.
-Their reliability may be more questionable than I thought. See below.

Additional Comments
I have 8 or so Sitemeter counters, because of the Pros listed above. However, last month, the Sitemeter counter recorded zero weekly visitors for a site that had more than that. [My website host also tracks the number of visitors to my pages… but I leave the Sitemeter for convenience and comparison.] This made me check my other Sitemeters… and some, but not all of them, were doing the same thing.

Seeing that this was happening, I briefly considered looking for a new counter. Ultimately lack of time made me opt to wait and see what happened.

I checked again this weekend, and all of the counters that had been stuck at zero were working again.

But! I decided to make a note of the current stats, for my records, just in case they went down again, or ultimately disappeared. And for one of my larger sites, I had previously made a note of the stats back on March 8, 2010. I found the difference quite interesting.

Total Visits as of September 21, 2013: 229,969
Total Visits as of March 8, 2010: 230,983

So…in over three years, my site has had negative 1,000 visitors? o.O

As I said above, I’m left wondering whether Sitemeter’s service is less reliable than I thought. Still, for now, the bottom line is that I’ll continue using them. I just take the data they produce with an even bigger grain of salt!